A Day in the Park With Gino

L.A. is a city of light and shadow, of sunny days and scary nights, of compassion beyond duty . . . and of madness beyond an ability to comprehend.

Creatures haunt the dark side of community, shapes at the edge of the light that move like spirits of violence through our collective conscience, confounding the experts, threatening the peace.

There are two worlds here.

One is the world most of us occupy, with families and jobs and the ability to function without breaking.

We deal with our problems, cope with our pain and go about our business in a manner that neither enhances nor disrupts the public weal.

The other is a world we read about.

Family life shatters in this world and dreams die. Children grow without hope and rage burns like fire in the night.

It’s a world of guns and violence, where survival, not adjustment, prevails, and drugs blur the outlines of castles in the distance.

Gino Rodriguez has lived in both worlds.

What makes him important today is the energy he expends to stay in the world of light and the message he imparts to those who remain in the world of darkness.

“Come out,” he says to them. “Maybe I can help. . . . “

I met with Gino in West Covina’s Gingrich Park on a day of bright sunshine laced with the chill of winter. He had telephoned several times to ask for the meeting.

“I’m an ex-con, an ex-junkie and an ex-gang member,” I remember him saying during one of the calls. “If I can tell kids about what I went through and how much I regret it, maybe they can avoid it.”

He is a solemn, muscular man of 46, and regret lies over his life like tule fog on a riverbed.

Twenty-eight of his years have been spent in juvenile halls, jails and prisons. He began using heroin at 15 and quit only three years ago.

He has been shot, stabbed and beaten and, in return, has robbed, stolen, dealt drugs and committed acts of violence too terrible to admit.

“I did everything you can think of,” he said with deliberate ambiguity that day in the park, unable to look me in the eye.

“Murder?” I asked.

He lit one of many cigarettes he would smoke during the time we talked.

“That too,” he said softly. The son of immigrant Mexicans, he was called Chino as a boy because of eyes that have an Asian slant. He was born in Vernon and raised in East L.A., and almost from the start edged toward the shadow world.

At 10, he began burglarizing homes. “I took stuff I didn’t even need,” he said. “You know, glasses, shavers, things like that. I don’t know why. I don’t know the why of anything.”

At 11, he went to Juvenile Hall. Later, he was kicked out of school for breaking another boy’s ribs in a fight.

“I was sent from school to school,” he said. “Nobody wanted me.”

During one of many trips to various juvenile halls, Rodriguez became a soldier for the Mexican Mafia, organized a gang of his own in the barrio and began dealing drugs.

When his own heroin habit grew to $800 a day, he led his gang into robbery to support it.

What may be Gino’s salvation today is a girl named Yolanda he met and married during the depth of his craziness 27 years ago. Five children were born during those years.

“She tried to get me to straighten out, to stop using drugs,” Rodriguez said, “but I thought I knew it all.”

His last crime was bank robbery, his last stop federal prison. At Terminal Island, an old man who had spent most of his life in prison gave him two words of advice: “Grow up.”

“I finally came to grips with myself,” he said. “Call it burnout, call it anything you want, but the old man’s words meant something. A new me was born. I was ready for the real world.”

Out of prison, he moved his family from East L.A. to West Covina. Two children still live at home. Thanks to Yolanda, all are making it. They know their father’s history, and he hopes they forgive him for it.

He works at whatever jobs he can find and coaches a teen-age baseball team on weekends.

Rodriguez recognizes how tenuous is the will that keeps him in the light and how necessary it is to have help. He wants to apply that knowledge to the kids still in the shadow world and is trying to figure out how.

Talking about it is one way.

He faced me directly for the first time during our conversation. “Before I die,” he said evenly, “I want to be able to say I did something good.”

Then he sat there in silence for a long time on a day radiant with sunlight, pondering the remembered darkness.